N.B.A. Playoffs: Spurs Use Motion and Misdirection to Lead Grizzlies

May 22, 2013

Off the Dribble

By BECKLEY MASON

Since 2007, the year the San Antonio Spurs won their last N.B.A. championship, no team has won more regular-season games than they have. The Spurs have reached three conference finals in that stretch, as many as any other team, without a single all-N.B.A. first team player.

Their coach, Gregg Popovich, is widely believed to be the best coach in the N.B.A. and Tim Duncan, though on the downslope of his career, will be remembered as one of the great players. The Spurs play as if perfection were not only possible but well within reach.

In short, the Spurs have set the gold standard for sustained excellence. And because they have not reached the N.B.A. finals since 2007, they have also been, to many, a disappointment.

In their previous five trips to the playoffs, the Spurs were eliminated by a lower-seeded team three times. The most memorable upset came in 2011, when the top-seeded Spurs fell ingloriously to the Memphis Grizzlies, their current opponent in the Western Conference finals, in six games.

But after Tuesday night’s overtime victory, which gave the Spurs a series lead of two games to none, they appear ready to reverse their recent postseason failings. Besides a bit of luck in the form of an injury to Russell Westbrook of the top-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder, a key has been a harmonious mixture of savvy veterans and athletic young players. After struggling for years to compete physically with quicker, more powerful teams, the Spurs have found the proper balance of grizzled experience and youthful energy.

Entering the series, the Spurs were expected to be physically overmatched by the Grizzlies’ snarling second-ranked defense, as they were in 2011. Instead, the Spurs have implemented their offense flawlessly, assisting on an outstanding 75 percent of their made buckets. Point guard Tony Parker’s incisive drives into the guts of the defense have yielded a bounty of open 3-pointers, something the Grizzlies specialize in preventing.

Parker has been phenomenal, but those great shots are not simply the result of individual brilliance. The Spurs, more than any other team, generate a tremendous amount of motion and misdirection on offense. Often the player who begins by setting a seemingly innocuous screen on one side of the court ends up being the player who, after a dizzying series of passes and cuts, winds up wide open for the shot.

Point guard Tony Parker’s incisive drives have yielded a bounty of open 3-pointers.

Mike Stone / Reuters

A series of plays called Hammer exemplifies this precision and misdirection. The play begins simply enough with a ball screen on one side of the court for Parker or Manu Ginobili. Most defenses are trained to force the ball to the baseline on these plays, and the Spurs’ guards oblige by driving hard in that direction. But as is so often the case, the real action is on the other side of the court, where a shooter floats down to the corner and a big man “hammers” the shooter’s defender with a back screen the defender never sees coming.

The timing must be exquisite for it all to work. Parker’s drive captivates the defensive players, and just when they think he is cornered along the baseline, he leaps out of bounds, creating an angle to zip a pass to that suddenly open shooter in the corner.

The Spurs run plays like this almost every time down the court, and they do it at a high speed. Parker will often initiate the motion at a gallop so the Spurs have ample time to run through their intricate motions before the shot clock expires. It is akin to a football team running the no-huddle, except the Spurs do it all game. They operate with a perfectionist’s meticulousness, yet never take their foot off the pedal.

So far in the Western Conference finals, the Grizzlies have not been able to keep up. The Spurs have exploited the tendency of celebrated defenders like Tony Allen to gamble and forced the Grizzlies’ weakest defender, Zach Randolph, to stop the Spurs at the point of attack.

The Spurs have used a similar approach to handcuff the Grizzlies’ offense. The second-year wing Kawhi Leonard has simply abandoned Allen, who missed seven shots within five feet of the basket in Game 2, to double-team Randolph, the Grizzlies’ leading scorer, before he even gets the ball. As a result, Randolph is shooting under 27 percent for the series, and the Grizzlies as a team are shooting just 38 percent.

Leonard and the shooting guard Danny Green have infused the defense with dearly needed tenacity and athleticism. After two years in the Spurs’ system, both have earned Popovich’s trust by adopting the detail-oriented approach of veterans like Duncan and Parker. Thus far, they are more than redeeming their shy, unsure play in last season’s conference finals loss to the Thunder.

After dominating the first seven quarters of the series, the Spurs finally lost focus and the Grizzlies clawed back to tie Game 2 in regulation. The key was replacing Allen and Tayshaun Prince with better shooters who could punish the Spurs for swarming Randolph. If Memphis Coach Lionel Hollins sticks with this adjustment, it should make for a much closer series.

The Spurs know no lead is safe. They also held a 2-0 advantage against the Thunder in last year’s Western Conference finals before losing four straight games. But this is a nastier, tougher Spurs team.

Should they escape Memphis, they will be a difficult matchup for whoever comes out of the East. The Spurs are worthy of grand expectations. But if they get back to the top of the mountain, it will be a result of their exceptional diligence on the smallest details.